After a brief summer hiatus, we are b
ack and blogging! As we describe in the recent blog post on HBR Network, innovation success stories are all strikingly similar: a bright idea, supported by a zealot-innovator who sees it through. The windfall of goodies follows. But failures happen for all sorts of reasons, and they often occur even when the idea is sound.
In a recent blog post on the Harvard Business Review bloggers network, we discuss the sustainability of the advantage that come from innovating the business model. With the Winter holiday shopping season, fashion apparel retailer Zara has been the focus of media attention — the New York Times recently profiled the innovative fast fashion business model pioneered by Zara, while Elizabeth Cline’s book on the costs of fast fashion has climbed up the sales charts. Despite this very recent popularity, the novel business model of Zara has gone virtually unnoticed for over 30 years, allowing Zara’s parent company, Inditex, to grow from zero to almost $20B in revenues. Why wasn’t it copied immediately? How can it be so sustainable and continue growing? The answer lies in a different type…
Over the last 2 weeks, I have been teaching a newly developed INSEAD MBA course on Identifying New Business Opportunities (INBO). The class is structured as a hands on experiential workshop that combines three novel approaches to Innovation/Entrepreneurship: Business Model Innovation, Idea Tournaments and Lean Startups/Discovery Driven Planning. As regular readers of this blog know, Business Model Innovation is all about identifying entrepreneurial opportunities via innovating the business models in existing competitive industries. Idea Tournaments is a process that leverages the wisdom of the crowd for selecting and developing amongst new business opportunities. Discovery-driven planning philosophy prioritizes tasks to limit entrepreneurial risk. Taken together, these approaches are in contrast to the conventional serendipitous, solitary process of innovation and it instead provides a systematic, risk-limiting pathway to realizing innovative outcomes.…
MIT Sloan Management Review just came out with the latest 2012 picks for the world’s most innovative companies. This is a great list which includes 50 very interesting companies (mostly young) in a number of industries. While I enjoyed reading about these innovative companies, I could not help but be once again disappointed with the exclusive focus on product and technology innovators on the list and the lack of Business Model Innovators. Why? I think first and foremost, it is very easy to “see” new products and technologies: when one sees a new iPhone or iPad it is quite easy to tell that this is a new product. On the other hand, new Business Models can be operated by companies for many years before…
In this blog we discussed Renaissance Innovations of many companies, small and big, old and new. Some of the startups we have already covered are Diapers.com, Objective Logistics, Amazon.com and many others. I hope that our blog makes it quite clear that the ideas of Renaissance Innovation method apply equally to startups and established companies. However, in this post I wanted to focus just on startups. The approach that is gaining a lot of momentum and good publicity is called “The Lean Startup“, most recently the new book debuted as #2 on the New York Times bestseller list. On the surface, this sounds like doing something on the cheap. These who know something about operations management will also recognize that “lean” is synonymous with…
Check out our new article in the May 2011 issue of the Harvard Business Review. This is the first published preview of the theory behind renaissance innovation. The reader of the article will notice that, so far, our blog simply described in more detail, the examples that appear in the article. As we have already hinted throughout this blog, the key behind successful Business Model Innovation is managing risks: in our view, all innovative companies we described in this blog have done the same thing right: they understood and managed the risk-return trade-offs in the design of their business model. This is, in our view, is a simple yet novel insight: all other works out there that study Business Models, typically focus on improving…
Hey! Welcome to our blog on Renaissance Innovation. Here we plan to share our latest research, case studies and thoughts on ideas that disrupt industries, revolutionize the business landscape, and generate immense wealth– all by selling exactly the same products as competitors to the same customers, but by reinventing the operating model of the industry. We call such ideas, and the process of identifying, generating and refining them the The Renaissance Innovation Method, or simply Renaissance Innovation. Who is a Renaissance Innovator? Why call it Renaissance?
The Renaissance Innovator 